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Excerpt from John Ruskin: Social Reformer
The very qualities which have pleased the body of his readers most, the brilliant word-painting (which he has vainly repudiated), the superb freedom of passionate utterance in praise and blame, the immense variety of swift and telling illustration, the gifts of rhetorical exaggeration which he employs, have done him this injury with sober-minded thinkers Of a more practical or scientific turn, that they have concealed the close and accurate texture of his deeper thought. Thus the selfish interests and the false passions which he so con stantly and bitterly assailed have, in part at any rate, succeeded in persuading large sections of the thinking world that, while Mr. Ruskin is a valuable art-critic and a brilliant litterateur, he has no claim to serious consideration as an economist and a thinker upon social reform. Particular phrases and judgments have been distorted and abused, the grossest misrepresentations of a general character have been employed, in order either to pretend that Mr. Ruskin did not really mean what he has plainly said, or that his fundamental notions and valuations are too unsubstantial to deserve the attention of thoughtful practical reformers. This is the common price paid by literary genius to the dull-witted multitude, who have always been easily persuaded that a man who writes well cannot think clearly or deeply.
Some even among his lovers and admirers may hold their master to blame for a certain perverse ingenuity of waywardness in the intentional disorder of his reasoning. That he has in fact carried this disorder so far as to hide from many the full appreciation of his logic is my chief excuse for this work.
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